Make Sure Your Home Is Ready To Sell

Clear the Air would like to share some helpful tips to selling your house.  Of course, if you experience any sort of odor in your home, Clear the Air is guaranteed to completely eliminate any and all odors.

1. Clean your house and keep it clean. If you are planning to live in your home while it is on the market, you have GOT to make daily cleaning a part of your selling plan.  It may be a pain to keep things spotless but cleanliness is important! A dirty home will give the potential buyers sense that the home is not well taken care of and can keep them from coming back a second time to look at your home with an offer.
2. Fix the broken stuff.  Shutter hanging off the house?  Piece of trim missing?  Door sticking?  Get it fixed!  If those little things are visible, your potential buyers start wondering what other maintenance issues your home might have and get scared. Make sure there wouldn’t be anything that could (1) keep buyers away and (2) knock dollars off of your asking price.
3. Eliminate odor from your home and make it smell good. Last thing you want is people to walk in your home and say, “It smells like feet in here.”  Guess what?  Each house was the home of boys but not everyone has to smell it!  Smell is very powerful and instantly sets the tone for your potential buyer’s experience in your house.  Avoid anything over-powering (some people are sensitive to strong perfumes) but find a way to make the air clean and homey.
4. De-personalize your home.  Want your  buyers to imagine themselves living in your house?  Then take YOU out of it!  You have got to take down your personal photos, scrapbooks, take down from the mantle the carving of your last name.  Buyers need to see their family living here … not yours.
5. De-clutter your home.  Potential buyers will turn their nose up at homes that had a lot of “stuff.”  Why?  They looked small.  They looked like they were running out of storage room.  They looked messy. The clutter keeps these homes from looking move-in ready. You want to make your home look spacious and ready to accommodate another family’s possessions.  Why would anyone want a house that appears to NOT have room for anything?
   
6. Utilize your garage or rent a storage room to hide bulky furniture. We packed away our piano, several chairs and extra side tables to highlight the space in our home.  You don’t want people bumping into furniture or having to turn sideways to get around. Likewise, take everything off your kitchen counters.
7. Make the exterior of your home look as good as possible.  Landscaping and the exterior of your home are just as important as the inside. Power-wash your house and sidewalk.  You can’t necessarily control the color of your brick but you can clean it, and doing so will take tons of dirt off and make your home instantly all the more inviting.  Freshen up beds with mulch.  Trim bushes and trees — especially those in front of any windows.  Overgrown shrubbery is not attractive and keeps natural light out of your home, making rooms feel dark and small.  Plant new flowers in your beds and/or add a few flower pots to your porch.  Flower brighten up your home and help your home feel welcoming.
8. Figure out your budget for any possible upgrades and cleaning services.  We can’t all afford to completely renovate our homes before putting it on the market but most of us can spend some money upgrading different aspects of our houses. Granite is cheaper than ever and, if you can afford it, a HUGE draw for buyers.  Can’t afford granite?  Well, what about repainting your kitchen or replacing outdated pulls and knobs?  Or spending a few bucks and a few hours to put in new ceramic tile?  If you can do the work yourself, you’ll save a ton of money and realize some updates are very easy (and cheap) to pull off.
9. Likewise, if you take a few minutes to research, you can find reputable carpet cleaners and window washers who will help get your house in ship-shape, making older carpet and windows fresh and sparking.
10. Get out of the house when it is being showed.  If you know a buyer is coming through — LEAVE! Take a walk, go to Target, head to the park but go somewhere so your buyers have the chance to consider your house for their future home.